But that's okay, because the good folks at Good Times Video hastily compiled clips from an assortment of old monster movies and released them back in 1992, just in time to cash in on the hype surrounding Jurassic Park.

The video begins with a very brief overview, featuring clips from early dino-cinema: Gertie the Dinosaur, The Lost World, and King Kong. This is the only background the film provides, and one wonders if it wasn't just pirated from another documentary. From there, we head straight into an unedited stretch of mid-70s promo for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad by Ray Harryhausen, a man who was doing faux-Saturday-Afternoon-Serial long before Lucas and Spielberg made it trendy. His trademark model animation features prominently, as does the film's model starlet, animatedly posing for cheesecake shots when she isn't needed on the set. All of this has, of course, pretty much nothing to do with dinosaurs, but pay attention, because it's the film's last attempt to explain anything. Following the "Sinbad" sequence, the video presents uncontextualized film trailers, run one after another in no particular order.

Although footage from the 1960sOne Million Years BC appears twice, the 1940soriginal is conspicuous by its absence. Instead, we see the trailers for several of the movies which have sampled that film's slurpasaurian stock footage.

Fantastic Dinosaurs of the Movies also features trailers from films lacking even the most tenuous connections to dinosaurs, such as Jack the Giant Killer and Tarantula, but, hey, they're fun to watch.

What makes this hasty compilation work is the charm of these old films, the sheer cheesiness of the special effects and the utter incoherence of the marketing strategies back in the days before Hollywood accountants took fantasy seriously and computers made effects easy. Hell, the collective budget of these things probably wouldn't cover the opening credits for a Lucasfilm.
If you find Fantastic Dinosaurs, give it a look, and marvel at the Cheesey Dino-Geist of Saturday Afternoons Past!